Fat-tailed sheep and thin-walled pots: contextualising rock art and pre-agriculturist pottery within the last 3000 years in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Abstract

Rock art is underutilised in the debate surrounding the indigenous adoption or rejection of domestic livestock during the last 2000 years in southern Africa. We redress this by exploring the antiquity and possible meaning of paintings of sheep in the northern uKhahlamba-Drakensberg. Diachronic changes in the archaeological record of the Thukela Basin over the last 3000 years are mapped. The distribution of early, thin-walled, non-fibre-tempered pottery and a relative chronology of rock art are used to build an argument that sheep paintings are old. We draw on the later patterning in agriculturist and forager material culture to explore the meaning of the older distributions. We suggest that the paintings predate the arrival of agriculturists to the region and that they are paintings of pastoralist-owned sheep. This conclusion has significance for the larger debate surrounding the arrival of the first livestock into southern Africa around 2000 years ago.